This Week in Spring - March 17th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring , which I'm posting ahead of my keynote at the amazing JavaOne 2026 event here in sunny San Francisco, California! I love Piotr's latest post on using local AI models with LM Studio and Spring AI Did you see the ne...

A Bootiful Podcast: Spring Messaging Legend Soby Chacko

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, we talk with the legendary Soby Chacko about Apache Kafka, Spring AI, and much more! apachekafka kafka...

This Week in Spring - March 10th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. As I write this, I am preparing for a trip to Rust, Germany, for one of the best Java conferences in Europe: JavaLand, along with its new companion event, DevLand. It should be fun. Will you be around? If so, say hi. We have ...

This Week in Spring - March 9th, 2026

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring! I'm writing this in an Uber en route to the airport to get to awsome Atlanta, GA, for Devnexus 2026! Who's goin'? You goin'? We - the Spring team - will be there in force! Come say hi at the boothes or come see our...

A Bootiful Podcast: Neo4j legend Jennifer Reif

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I talk to Jennifer Reif, developer advocate at Neo4J, about graph RAG, graph databases, GraphQL, Neo4J, Spring Data Neo4J, and more. neo4j graphRag AI artificialintelligence...

This Week in Spring - March 3rd, 2026

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring! I'm writing this in an Uber en route to the airport to get to awsome Atlanta, GA, for Devnexus 2026! Who's goin'? You goin'? We - the Spring team - will be there in force! Come say hi at the boothes or come see our...

Moving beyond Strings in Spring Data

If you've worked with data access in Java and especially with Spring Data for a while, then you are familiar with various Query and Update programming models. You write data access code. You refactor a property name. You run your tests. They fail. Your query strings? Still pointing to the old...

A Bootiful Podcast - John Willis, author of 'Rebels of Reason'

Hi Spring fans! In this installment I sit down with DevOps legend and industry analyst extraordinaire John Willis and talk about his new book Rebels of Reason: The Long Road from Aristotle to ChatGPT and AI's Heroes Who Kept the Faith , and talk about the nature of the ecosystem, AI, the role of...

Optimizations in Spring MVC

Spring Fruits Benchmark Abstract Benchmarks are tricky to do well, and the results are often hard to interpret. This analysis attempts to go beyond a simple headline number to explore how performance varies with data set size. The results show that while results might be disappointing for a given...

This Week in Spring - February 24th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another awesome and oh-so-agentic week in Spring! We've got a ton to look into, and I've got even more to prepare for next week's DevNexus event in Atlanta, GA, so let's dive right into it! Be sure to say "hi" if you're going to be there, though! You've heard of Agent...

A Bootiful Podcast: Glenn Renfro on Java and Spring community legend and my friend - on Devnexus and more

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment I talk to the amazing Glenn Renfro about Spring Batch, Spring Integration, Spring AI, and much more — plus why you should definitely register to attend the amazing Devnexus event in Atlanta, GA!...

This Week in Spring - February 17th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring! It's Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year for billions of people around the world and to those who celebrate, Happy Chinese/Lunar New Year 新年快乐! Or Happy Spring Festival 春节快乐! My favorite kind of festival! In honor ...

A Bootiful Podcast: Java Champion and hilarious friend, Richard Fichtner

Hi, Spring fans! I've been waiting for this episode for so long! Today, we're finally joined by my friend Richard Fichtner, who so took pity on my plight waiting for music to be added to the GraalVM that his company, XDev Software, created the music-maven-plugin, the best Maven plugin, ever! This...

This Week in Spring - February 10th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's February 10th, 2026, as I write this from lovely London, UK. I spoke at the local Java User Group here last night, had a wonderful time. Tomorrow, I'm going home. It's been fun, but it's time to conclude this roller...

A Bootiful Podcast: JetBrains and Spring community legend Marco Behler

hi, Spring fans! In this installment I have the privilege of talking to JetBrains legend Marco Behler...

This Week in Spring - February 3rd, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! This week I'm in northern Europe. I went on the Vaadin cruise from Finland to Sweden, gave a talk on a boat, then arrived in Stockholm in time for the amazing JFokus 2026 event where I had the privilege yesterday of doing a deep dive with my pal James Ward on Spring AI and agenti...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 5): Building Interoperable Agents with the Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol

The Agent2Agent A2A Protocol is an open standard for seamless AI agent communication. It enables agents to discover capabilities, exchange messages, and coordinate workflows across platforms—regardless of their implementation. Spring AI A2A integrates the A2A Java SDK with Spring AI through Sprin...

A Bootiful Podcast: Start Your Year with Java Right with Java Developer Advocate Billy Korando

Hi, Spring and Java fans! In this episode I am beyond delighted to talk Java developer advocate and longtime friend of the show Billy Korando about the latest-and-greatest in the Java ecosystem...

Anthropic Agent Skills Support in Spring AI

In this blog, we show how using Spring AI, we can integrate with Anthropic's Native Skills API for Cloud-Based Document Generation and Custom Skills. Spring AI adds support for Anthropic's Agent Skills — modular capabilities that let Claude generate actual files rather than text descriptions. Wit...

This Week in Spring - January 27th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this, I cannot believe we're nearly at the end of the month! Time sure flies. Spring AI 2.0.0-M2 is available now Spring Modulith 2.1 M1, 2.0.2, and 1.4.7 released In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast ,...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 4): Subagent Orchestration

Instead of one generalist agent doing everything, delegate to specialized agents. This keeps context windows focused—preventing the clutter that degrades performance. Task tool, part of the spring-ai-agent-utils toolkit, is a portable, model-agnostic Spring AI implementation inspired by Claude...

This Week in Spring - January 26th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this, I cannot believe we're nearly at the end of the month! Time sure flies. Spring AI 2.0.0-M2 is available now Spring Modulith 2.1 M1, 2.0.2, and 1.4.7 released In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast ,...

A Bootiful Podcast: Jetbrains legend Dmitry Jemerov

Hi, Spring and IntelliJ IDEA fans! This week we celebrate 25 years of Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA, and who better to talk to us about its evolution than Dmitry Jemerov, whose been a contributor and developer for the project since 2003!...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 3): Why Your AI Agent Forgets Tasks (And How to Fix It)

Have you ever asked an AI agent to perform a complex multi-step task, only to find it skipped a critical step halfway through? You're not alone. Research shows that LLMs struggle with "lost in the middle" failures—forgetting tasks buried in long contexts. When your agent juggles file edits, test...

This Week in Spring - January 20th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's already the 20th of January and we are off on yet another rip roarin' adventure as we look at the week that has been... this week in Spring! even more good stuff from Spring AI team legend Christian Tsolov, this one on...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 2): AskUserQuestionTool - Agents That Clarify Before Acting

Traditional AI interactions follow a common pattern: you provide a prompt, the AI makes assumptions, and produces a response. When those assumptions don't match your needs, you're left iterating through corrections. Each assumption creates rework—wasting time and context. What if your AI agent...

A Bootiful Podcast: Jonatan Ivanov on how to measure all the things with Micrometer

Hi, Spring fans! This week we catch up with the observably awesome Jonatan Ivanov on how to measure all the things with Micrometer...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 1): Agent Skills - Modular, Reusable Capabilities

Agent Skills are modular folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that AI agents can discover and load on demand. Instead of hardcoding knowledge into prompts or creating specialized tools for every task, skills provide a flexible way to extend agent capabilities. Spring AI's implementatio...

This Week in Spring - January 13th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans, and welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's the 13th of January, 2026, and it's been quite the week indeed! Let's dive right into it! Nobody, and I mean nobody , asked. So I put together a video on how to use Spring WS to build SOAP-based services in 2026. Hey...

A Bootiful Podcast: Spring Security lead Rob Winchon Spring Security 7

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I have the privilege of sitting down and talking to the legendary Rob Winch, lead of Spring Security, Spring Session, and the amazing Testjars project...

This Week in Spring - January 6th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans, to the first installment of This Week in Spring in the new year and , roughly, the fifteenth anniversary edition of this series! I've been writing these blogs since the first week of January of 2011, and I am proud to say that I haven't so far missed a single week! I've always...

A Bootiful Podcast: Apache Tomcat legend Mark Thomas (Happy new year!)

In this episode, I talk with Mark Thomas, the legendary and highly prolific committer to Apache Tomcat. Happy New Year!...

This Year in Spring – December 30th, 2025

Hi, Spring fans! Can you believe it? It's already the 30th of December! I celebrated Christmas with my family in Los Angeles, then we jumped on a flight headed for Southeast Asia to ring in the New Year with more friends and family. I'm sitting at a café in the sweltering city of Kuala Lumpur,...

Evolving Spring Vault: Introducing VaultClient

Back in September 2016, nearly a decade ago now, we introduced Spring Vault as a integration layer for HashiCorp Vault within Spring applications, complemented by Spring Cloud Vault for Spring Boot arrangements. The core idea has always been straightforward: Externalizing secrets to encrypted Vau...

A Bootiful Podcast: Nate Schutta the fundamentals of software engineering

Hi Spring fans, and happy holidays! I'm delighted to be joined again on this episode by my friend and fellow harbinger of doom in the best possible way, Nate Schutta — co-author of the wonderful book Foundations of Software Engineering!...

Explainable AI Agents: Capture LLM Tool Call Reasoning with Spring AI

When building AI agents with tool calling capabilities, developers often need insights into why an LLM chose a particular tool—not just which tool it selected. Understanding the model's reasoning process is important for debugging, observability, and building trustworthy AI systems. Spring AI now...

This Week in Spring – December 23rd, 2025

Happy holidays, everyone! The year may be winding down, but the Spring ecosystem continues unabated. We’re now a few weeks past the generational Spring Boot 4.0 release in November, and there have been tons of releases and patches since then. There’s also equal excitement reflected in posts from...

A Bootiful Podcast: Spring cofounder Juergen Hoeller on the amazing Spring Framework 7 release

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, we talk to the legendary cofounder of Spring itself, Juergen Hoeller, about the awesome new Spring Framework 7 release. Happy holidays, one and all!...

Next level Kotlin support in Spring Boot 4

Following the announcement of the strategic partnership between JetBrains and Spring in May, I would like to share a global update on various Kotlin-related features and documentation enhancements we have made recently, with the goal of making Spring Boot 4 the best framework to develop backend...

This Week in Spring – December 16th, 2025

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! And what a week it’s been! We’ve got around nine shopping days ’til Christmas, and the New Year is almost here! Things are moving so quickly and the Spring community is no exception! Let's dive into this week's wonderful...

Smart Tool Selection: Achieving 34-64% Token Savings with Spring AI's Dynamic Tool Discovery

As AI agents connect to more services—Slack, GitHub, Jira, MCP servers—tool libraries grow rapidly. A typical multi-server setup can easily have 50+ tools consuming 55,000+ tokens before any conversation starts. Worse, tool selection accuracy degrades when models face 30+ similarly-named tools. T...

A Bootiful Podcast: The legendary Rossen Stoyanchev on API versioning, declarative interface clients, RestTestClients, and more

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of a Bootiful Podcast! In this installment I talk to the legendary Rossen Stoyanchev on API versioning, declarative interface clients, RestTestClients, and more!...

This Week in Spring - December 9th, 2025

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! I am in lovely New Jersey, the Garden State , as I write this and I spent most of the last week in New Orleans. It's been a busy week in the Spring community and beyond and so you know what that means? There's a ton of stuff ...

Towards Spring Tools 5 - Ready for AI

There is no doubt that AI-based coding assistants are already or will be widely used by developers and within organizations. While the overall outlook is pretty certain, the exact way when and how to use those tools might vary, ranging from extensions for existing IDEs e.g. Copilot for Visual...

A Bootiful Podcast: Dan Vega on the fundamentals of software engineering

Hi, Spring fans! I'm so excited to chat with fellow Spring developer advocate Dan Vega about his new book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering...

This Week in Spring - December 2nd, 2025

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. By mistake, I inadvertently published older content in this installment, then tried to fix it and ended up re-publishing the same content. And, what's worse, I somehow ended up deleting the draft I had written for this...

Towards Spring Tools 5 - Stereotypes and a new Structural View

When working on Spring projects, developers do not only think in terms of low-level concepts like classes and interfaces. When using Spring, you think about higher-level abstractions and concepts like services, repositories, configuration classes, entities, aggregate roots, and so on. To bring...

A Bootiful Podcast: Spring community legend and friend Simon Martinelli

Hi, Spring fans! Happy Thanksgiving from me, and I am sure the entire Spring team, to you! We are, it should be clear, oh so very grateful.. thankful.. for you, the community. This week it is my great pleasure to chat with Spring community legend Simon Martinelli...

Beyond JSON: Converting Spring AI Tool Response Formats to TOON, XML, CSV, YAML, ...

JSON is the go-to format for LLM tool responses, but recent discussions around alternative formats like TOON Token-Oriented Object Notation claim potential benefits in token efficiency and performance. While the debate continues—with critical analyses pointing to context-dependent results—the...

This Week in Spring - Spring Boot 4 edition! - November 25th, 2025

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another illustrious installment of This Week in Spring! It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States. Thanksgiving is traditionally celebrated with friends and family every fourth Thursday of November, gathered around a table full of food and, usually, a giant...